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Working Paper
Regulation and the cost of capital in Japan: a case study
Over the last several years, a combination of loan losses and regulatory barriers to equity issuance have left Japanese banks starved for capital. In September 1995, the Mitsubishi Bank was permitted to issue a complicated convertible security in a foreign market. The results of simulations of the price path of the underlying equity imply that Mitsubishi Bank's annualized risk-adjusted cost of capital through this instrument was between 80 and 310 basis points higher than if the bank had instead been able to issue common stock at its current price.
Working Paper
More evidence on the link between bank health and investment in Japan
Among stock-market-listed Japanese firms in 1994-95, the financial health of the firm's main bank did not significantly affect its investment behavior, after controlling for stock market valuation and cash flow. However, among the subset of bank-dependent firms, investment was lower by over 50 percent at firms that have one of the lowest-rated banks as their main bank. Because low-rated banks are smaller and deal with fewer firms, and because bank-dependent firms themselves tend to be smaller than non-bank-dependent firms, the aggregate effect on business investment in 1994-95 that I identify ...
Journal Article
Credit derivatives and risk management
The striking growth of credit derivatives suggests that market participants find them to be useful tools for risk management. This paper illustrates credit derivatives' value with three examples: a commercial bank using credit derivatives to manage loan portfolio risk; an investment bank using them to manage the risks of underwriting securities; and an investor, such as an insurance company, asset manager, or hedge fund, using them to align credit risk exposure with a desired credit risk profile. ; But credit derivatives pose risk-management challenges of their own; the author discusses five ...
Working Paper
Long-term banking relationships in general equilibrium
I examine the relationship between a financial intermediary ("bank") and a borrowing firm in a three-period overlapping generations model. The model can accommodate two financing arrangements between the bank and the firm: one requires commitment to a long-term contract, the other does not. Which arrangement is chosen depends on whether such a commitment can be credibly made. After defining the two arrangements, I compare their features with real-world financial dealings. Once the form of the long-term relationship between the bank and the firm is set, investment and output of the economy ...
Working Paper
Incorporating event risk into value-at-risk
Event risk is the risk that a portfolio's value can be affected by large jumps in market prices. Event risk is synonymous with "fat tails" or "jump risk". Event risk is one component of "specific risk", defined by bank supervisors as the component of market risk not driven by market-wide shocks. Standard Value-at-Risk (VaR) models used by banks to measure market risk do not do a good job of capturing event risk. In this paper, I discuss the issues involved in incorporating event risk into VaR. To illustrate these issues, I develop a VaR model that incorporates event risk, which I call ...
Working Paper
Improving grid-based methods for estimating value at risk of fixed-income portfolios
Jamshidian and Zhu (1997) propose a discrete grid method for simplifying the computation of Value at Risk (VaR) for fixed-income portfolios. Their method relies on two simplifications. First, the value of fixed income instruments is modeled as depending on a small number of risk factors chosen using principal components analysis. Second, they use a discrete approximation to the distribution of the portfolio's value. We show that their method has two serious shortcomings which imply it cannot accurately estimate VaR for some fixed-income portfolios. First, risk factors chosen using principal ...
Journal Article
An international survey of stress tests
In the summer of 2000, central banks from the Group of Ten countries surveyed large international banks about their use of stress tests_a risk management tool that measures a firm's exposure to extreme movements in asset prices. The survey findings highlight the risks that most concern financial institutions and clarify how these institutions use stress tests in their overall risk management programs.
Working Paper
Evaluating forecasts of correlation using option pricing
A forecast of the correlation between two asset prices is required to price or hedge an option whose payoff depends on both asset prices or to measure the risk of a portfolio whose return depends on both asset prices. However, a number of factors make it difficult to evaluate forecasts of correlation. We develop a forecast evaluation methodology based on option pricing, extending a technique that Engle et al. (1993) introduced to evaluate volatility forecasts. A forecast of the variance-covariance matrix of joint asset returns is used to generate a trading strategy for a package of simulated ...
Working Paper
The implications of risk management information systems for the organization of financial firms
Financial dealer firms have invested heavily in recent years to develop information systems for risk measurement. I take it as given that technological progress is likely to continue at a rapid pace, making it less expensive for financial firms to assemble risk information. I look beyond questions of risk measurement methodology to investigate the implications of risk management information systems. By examining several theoretical models of the firm in the presence of asymmetric information, I explore how a financial firm's capital budgeting, incentive compensation, capital structure, and ...
Working Paper
Credit derivatives and risk management
The striking growth of credit derivatives suggests that market participants find them to be useful tools for risk management. I illustrate the value of credit derivatives with three examples. A commercial bank can use credit derivatives to manage the risk of its loan portfolio. An investment bank can use credit derivatives to manage the risks it incurs when underwriting securities. An investor, such as an insurance company, asset manager, or hedge fund, can use credit derivatives to align its credit risk exposure with its desired credit risk profile.> However, credit derivatives pose risk ...